


His Green Light

by OstarsofheavenOgrassofgraves



Category: Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Genre: 1920s, Alcohol, Everyone is queer unless stated otherwise, F/F, F/M, Jazz Age, M/M, Nick is still in love with Gatsby and he doesn't know how to move on, The Great Gatsby but make it queer, The Great Gay-tsby, the lost generation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:48:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27343036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OstarsofheavenOgrassofgraves/pseuds/OstarsofheavenOgrassofgraves
Summary: A few years after Gatsby's murder, Nick Carraway finds comfort in liquor and lovers. He plans to spend his newly acquired wealth traveling the world, burying his memories of broken friendships and lost love. At least, those were his plans before unexpectedly meeting Jordan Baker in Paris. Jordan worries about Nick's habits and deteriorating health, but Nick resists her suggestion of returning to New York. He is scared to revisit the past, for he fears that he will never be able to forget Gatsby. Unbeknownst to Nick, Gatsby cannot forget him, either--even in the afterlife.
Relationships: Catsby, Nick Carraway x Jay Gatsby
Comments: 5
Kudos: 14





	His Green Light

Pale shafts of late-afternoon light streamed through the ajar window and broke the borrowed room into fragments: in one portion, I lay in a type of stupor that limited my thoughts to the decrescendo drumming of my heartbeat through my now hollow head; in another, the scattered belongings of somewhat itinerant types, the young folks who can afford to remove themselves from any one place without consideration for a larger personal history; and in the corner by the kitchenette, my most recent acquaintance stood starkly naked, presumably debating the merits of the ingredients he had collected late this morning from street vendors.

  
Hearing me stir on the bed, he inquired over his shoulder, “‘Ungry, cherie?” The saccharine quality of his accented English was so addictive, I wanted to pester him with inane questions for the rest of the day to compile a catalogue in my mind of his sound. Nearly a decade stood between me and my last French studies, where even my well-tailored professor could not keep hold of my attention through the doldrums of increasingly bizarre conjugations, and so I silently thanked my companion for his patience with my one tongue.

  
I almost laughed at myself, finding my form sprawled out in the room adjacent to the one I was renting, exploring a foreign land not through language and arts but rather from one bed to another. Even in all their desperate and deplorable plow west, Americans held the coast and continent just east in high esteem and inculcated these beliefs in generations of children sent away for preparatory school and college and lucrative careers. No matter how ardently a man in St. Paul waved his flag on Independence Day, he would still hold idle dreams of European delights that were drawn only in silhouette within his school-kid memories—or perhaps, more tragically, within his lasting visions of the Great War. A continent of museums, cafés, libraries, and universities awaited me; I was within walking distance of great cathedrals, and while I had spent my first week in France prostrate and praising God in one way or another, I had not yet completed any pilgrimage.

  
I rose languidly from the cheap twisted sheets and entwined myself around Henri—or perhaps it was Herve, I couldn’t be sure—as he protectively watched two eggs sputter in butter. The rich orange yolks were like twin full moons in the October night, clouding over as they cooked. My young chef blew out the stove but ignited a different flame within me as he turned and embraced my bare chest with the sheer angles of his face.

  
We dined on the windowsill, not bothering with clothes even as we pressed our foreheads to the cool glass and surveyed the scenes of leisure in Parisian autumn. We felt assured that no one would glance up to be scandalized by our midday freshness, as the couples at their street-side tables were far too engrossed in their coffees and conversation to think of a world a few floors above their heads. I imagined walking out into the street just as I was and finding that for miles and miles, every group of part-time artists and full-time hedonists would represent their own planet with too thick an atmosphere of cigarette smoke and philosophical notions to possibly catch sight of a white meteor passing them by. A hand gently stroked the razed skin of my neck, raw from yesterday’s informal visit to a barber’s apartment. His fingers traced down the length of my shoulders with an ease that I believed only carelessness and ignorance of another person afforded.

  
“Where would you like to go?” The question struck me with its tense, its presumption of a shared future. By nightfall, I guessed that our only lasting connection would be the wall separating our two rooms. We might go out into the waning light together, wishfully holding each other in some small way, but by twilight, with liquor in our glasses and tobacco on our breath—among other things—we would be ensnared in different companions. The well-carved memory of commuting into Manhattan bubbled in the back of my consciousness; for all my dread of going to work, I found a new thrill in each stranger who boldly held my eyes as we stood on the same car, only for one of us to suddenly nod and disappear to the next train. If only the ride could stretch itself longer, taking me to a countryside of steep hills and deep bodies of water.

  
I took his hand from my shoulder and tugged it to my lips. “Back to bed,” I whispered into the lines of his palm.

  
***

  
There was a time where I prided myself on differing from my peers in the matters of drink and dance. Even in my vernal years, I mostly abstained from the beverages that my fraternity brothers poured with borderline manic delight for themselves and visiting co-eds. Not to suggest that I was an utter bluenose, for I certainly came to know a good deal of dormitories with or without the misguidance of alcohol, but I held onto a certain conservative sensibility until my early thirties. Now, entrenched in a decade of aimlessness, I lost track of the number of cocktails that passed my lips each night and the addresses I collected in my pocketbook started to resemble a directory in length and diversity.

  
My grand tour of Europe was less a tourist dream or a magnificent journey for the troubled mind and more a collection of sights and sounds from ordinary people I could have just easily met on the other side of the Atlantic. Paris was to me a city without inhibitions, a daring soul looking skyward with every intention of rising and pressing into the edges of space with each exhalation. Strolling to the bars with a crowd of chipper young men, all clearly American by their manner of dress and stumble, I glanced back at the tower in all her glory and almost hear her taunt to the twinkling stars, I am among you. The casual thrust of an elbow into my ribs shattered my reverie, but the offender inspired new fantasies.

  
“Are you already ossified?” This fellow from the navy roughly fastened my chin between his thumb and forefinger to bring my visage into the streetlight. He jokingly inspected my eyes for a sheen of drunkenness, but I suspected he had just slowed us down to break off from the pack. He brought his discerning and theatrically scrunched face closer to mine, tilting at the neck as if he were at a laboratory bench on the precipice of discovery. My neck felt tense and warm as I waited for this scientist’s inspection.  
With our company satisfactorily ahead of us, my sailor smirked and pulled my face the last few inches to his lips. I could not help but smile as I tasted a sweet and citrusy whisper of juniper from the 75 he must have downed at the gallery before inviting me to his crew. I combed my fingertips through the tight quiff of his days-overgrown standard-issue hair as his arms encircled me. Upon first noticing him amongst the portraits and picking him out as work of art in his own right, I had assumed we were the same age—surely, we could have been classmates at Yale. His eagerness and voracious speed, however, convinced me he was my junior by at least a decade; his strength, his appetite, his all-consuming elation at being able to grasp another man in the street seemed to be trademarks of youth. As the pressure of his kiss intensified, even I could pretend clocks were running in reverse, saving me from years wasted without such passion.

  
His lips broke away to ask, “do you think anyone’s using that alley?” He jerked his head to the narrow strip between two buildings; in the darkness, only the vague outlines of objects—but no people—were immediately clear. I suppressed a laugh as I pictured placing my hands on the rusty brick walls and my knees in the cold refuse of true Parisians, living their days and making their trash without ever thinking of the excited foreigners who would one day scamper through the artifacts of their lives on the way to a shrouded corner of a bursting city. My partner’s eagerness dug into my hip as I scanned the street for others who might watch or even steal our idea. “I think it’s perfectly empty.”

  
And with my answer, the sailor led me by the waist into the darkness while simultaneously loosening my belt. Hearing the tumble and metallic clink of pants being opened behind me, I breathed out, “I love Paris.”

  
***

  
I lost the sailor in the swing of it all, somewhere in the second bar of that evening. Last I remembered, he was animatedly explaining the difference between two works of art that I figured he had never seen before in his life, all while nearly levitating a coupe of champagne in his left hand and a tumbler of whiskey in his right; I did not care to learn the flavor of that particular mixture and departed his debate (or conversation, I could not tell) without a word.

  
The entryway was suddenly illuminated by the spark of flashbulbs from the steps outside. A great crowd poured in, every member with their head turned in fascination at the couple attracting this flickering storm of media intrigue. In the center of the shuffling mass of people stood a tall man and almost equally tall woman on his arm, dressed as if they were royals from another era. Soft robes of the most intense violet clung to their bodies and swayed as they walked deeper into this den of plebeians drinking till they felt like modern aristocrats. Small clusters of giddy admirers called out to them at opposite ends of the room, waving them down with a mask of elegance over the desperation of a lone sinking survivor, the motion of their hands the only cause to bring saviors to them. With a swift and chaste kiss, the couple parted to entertain the masses.

  
I found myself staring at the retreating figure of the woman. The lilt of her walk was so particular and practiced that I must have seen that gait somewhere, followed it side by side. Even cloaked, her legs betrayed an athleticism and grace that few attain. With the edge of a glass between my lips, I dwelled in memories half fogged over by the events of the day and my own reticence to fully recall the life I had lived to that point. Then it was the way her hair caught the light in her corner of the world that refocused my mind to an almost painful degree. I gazed at her autumn-leaf locks and realized I had nearly proposed to this woman before. My teeth were about to break glass as I saw her turn alone and approach the bar. We caught eyes. For a moment, the rarefied air about her dissipated and her face was that of a schoolgirl caught rummaging through forged love notes—but it was only a moment. The change in her, the change she produced in others, was palpable as she came up to my side and draped her long forearms over the bar. A martini materialized before her hands as if she had conjured it.

  
“Ms. B—“

  
She put her hand up in a forbidding gesture, held aloft to stop me in my introductions. We knew each other too well for this, her fingers said—and yet we could also say we hardly knew anything about each other at all.

  
“Mrs. Archibald,” she corrected, now extending that same hand for me to kiss. I found my lips an inch away from a diamond set in rubies. The ring was dazzling, to be sure, but completely unlike anything I would expect her to choose for herself.

  
“I know, it’s too much, isn’t it?” She examined her own hand now, slowly turning it in space to ponder or to model. Then, with a slow and deliberate flick, she brought the hand below her chin and shimmied her fingers like a pianist mid-tremolo. “But then again, we’re all too much now, aren’t we? It’s just the way of things.”

  
“And you deserve nothing less, Mrs. Archibald!” I toasted to her. She held her martini aloft as I emptied my drink, a smirk on her lips as I gestured to the bartender with gusto.

  
“My my, Nick. Seems that last I saw you, you could have been a teetotaler.” She cocked one sharp eyebrow and smiled wider as I poured the contents of my new glass down my throat. Something in her countenance unnerved me so that I was desperate for the dull warmth of liquor. “The night is still so young and the color in your cheeks tells me you’re drunk.”

  
I scoffed into the last dregs of the cocktail. “We’re no longer young and I’ve been drunk since four o’clock in the afternoon.” The bartender was out of sight, but I could not bear to be alone with Jordan empty-handed. Loaded beyond a prohibitionist’s most debauched dreams, I should have been stumbling from intoxication and not a reintroduction I had never cared to make. Pressing my fists into the wood paneling of the bar, I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment to lasso some composure or will to speak further. The few seconds of forced darkness faded like sugar on my tongue and I let the scene back in. “Or if you concern yourself with details, I’ve been drunk since yesterday morning.” She had yet to finish a mere sip of her martini, but my impatience bested any modicum of propriety I had left in my pickled mind.

  
“May I?” I asked, my fingers unfurling and already touching the stem of her glass. She laughed through her nostrils and released it to me.

  
“Of course I’m concerned with the details,” she cooed, even as she reached out to a passing individual with just enough attention to bend anyone’s will. The person stopped immediately at her touch, caught in a spell.

  
“Dear, you wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette, now would you?” Jordan slid one fingertip under the lapel of this handsome young woman’s jacket, threatening to let her hands glide over to the bewitched girl’s tie and pull.

  
With some fumbling and stuttered assurances, the girl produced a cigarette and a pack of matches. “By God, I’m saved, Nick!” Jordan cried out. She leaned down to pluck the cigarette from the girl’s hand with her lips, then waited with a devilish flair for a light.

  
“Oh, anything for you, Madame,” the girl pled, delicately cupping the flame and holding it out. Jordan moved in an inch closer to that trembling ball of orange and let her eyelids fall as she took her first breath. “Anything for you.”

  
Jordan regained her posture and leaned back with one lithe arm on the bar. After all this time, she still possessed this dangerously enticing air about her that I previously believed only belonged to the young and carefree. She had always been something else entirely, however; never carefree in the traditional sense, but she remained addictively careless. I suppose I admired that about her and had started to emulate that quality in my newest escapades, but I was only a student of apathy and she was a grandmaster.

  
“Anything, you say?” Jordan pulled the cigarette from her mouth and pursed her lips. Smoothing the fabric on her savior’s shoulder, she let her fingers traipse down the length of the girl’s arm to join hands. Shivering, the girl brought Jordan’s hands to her dark lips reverently. Then she released the enchanter’s hand with a solemn intensity in her eyes. Jordan had found a true devotee. “Find me later, dear, so I can properly thank you.”

  
The young woman nodded automatically with a slack jaw and retreated to a group of comrades, all in dark suits with short-cropped hair. Even without the haze of drink, I am certain they would have put the coiffed looks of the Yale drama department to shame.

  
“You’ve got a girl, Nick? Or a beau?”

  
I scanned the still-growing crowd of the room, letting my gaze linger on a few select gentlemen who had already been staring in my direction. My hand found its way to the part in my hair, attempting to find some physical promise that I had something they wanted—if even for a moment. Then I locked eyes with a striking man with terribly bright eyes and tan skin and the whole planet fell off its axis.

  
Muffled orchestral music seeped into the room, leaking through the ceilings and walls. The bodies around me multiplied but lost all definition, transmogrifying into charcoal blurs of humans. I felt a glow on my skin that was tantalizingly warm and assuring at first but quickly burned me with all the callousness of the July sun at high noon. Every sound and figure started to recede as it had come, but the light and heat persisted until—

  
“Nick?”

  
I shook my head vigorously and returned to Jordan’s side. The bright-eyed man I had been looking at was nowhere to be found.  
“No one yet, but I’ll find someone before I leave.”

  
Jordan rolled her head back in laughter, but her response betrayed no sense of surprise. Perhaps she laughed with a slight pang of relief that, for as close as our celestial objects had rocketed past each other in the night of years since abandoned, we had never come to be gravitationally locked about each other in a spirited but ultimately loveless orbit.

  
Her satellite was off making merry conversation at the other end of the bar, tucked between the arms of two muscular men who could have lifted the actor off his feet with one arm.

  
“When was the wedding? I’m sorry to have missed it.”

  
She sighed a bit, stretching her neck from side to side in a motion that suggested she was already bored with the topic.  
“April—in Los Angeles. Archie said we were already damned, so we had the main ceremony out in the sun.” She hummed quietly to herself around her cigarette in amusement. “After he finished his last picture, we boarded a ship and have been abroad since. I guess this has all been one protracted honeymoon.”

  
Her traveling partner laughed with such gusto that both our heads snapped to attention. Fellows all around clapped him on the shoulder, pawing at the fabric of his chiton. I predicted this crowd-pleaser would be topless within the hour.

  
“A California wedding in spring. Surely it was a golden time.”

  
“Mmm, positively lavender,” she toyed.

  
A band I had otherwise completely ignored since arriving struck up a tune that inspired a frantic energy in newly formed couples on the dance floor. The gyre of partiers excited me briefly, for all the raucous noise and interactions reminded me that I was amongst equally lost and lascivious fools who just desired and desired and desired, but the music played on and I felt my heart sink for fear of the last note. We could dance all night and have nothing and no one in the morning.

  
“Nick, you look unwell. Take a seat.”

  
I heard myself huff indignantly but then my body was in a chair by the wall, slouched at a table with Jordan’s drink clutched in my fist.

  
“Why are you still here?” I mumbled, trying to brusquely cast her off to some other soulless admirer so I could sober up in relative solitude. Despite my habit of keeping a constant, though impermanent, companion, I sought strangers. If I couldn’t have someone ignorant of my nature, I wanted no one at all for an hour. “Where’s your girl from before?”

  
“Which one?” She grinned at her own haughtiness, but shook her head. “Don’t worry, she’ll come home with me. With us.”

  
I started, rising just enough to fall back and bump my head into the wall. “With us, you said? I have a room, you know!”

  
“Yes, Nick, but will you get to your room? You can hardly stand, and I think you have half a mind to disappear in the night.”  
A coffee cup had been slid under my chin and I scowled into my black reflection. I soothed myself by thinking that I would have been fine that night had I not spoken to her at all.

  
Jordan had started a new cigarette, the white pristine cylinder balanced between her knuckles. She peered at me from her side of the table. I did not want to be perceived by Jordan Baker. “How long are you staying in Paris?”

  
I frowned, wondering if I had an answer. My mind crafted a picture of many nights, all with the same script. So long as no one I knew called upon me, I could live in this city for the rest of my numbered days and not change an iota about me. I would surely perish by forty.

  
“As long as I care to,” I responded obstinately, taking the scalding hot cup before me for a shield between my loose lips and her frustrated expression.

  
“Doesn’t seem wise, does it?”

  
“And who am I to care about wisdom,” I snorted, “or looking wise, for that matter!” My tongue pushed against the back of my teeth as I tried to draft some new and impressive itinerary that would extract me from the magnetic repetition of debauchery here. “I could go anywhere! I’ll take a train to the countryside, why don’t I? Or—or I’ll go from town to town in Spain.”

  
Jordan sighed again, this one more stern and communicative. “Nonsense, Nick. You need cities. You _watch_ people. You want people to watch you watching.” I truly did not want to be perceived by Jordan Baker, but there she was, considering me more honestly than anyone had in some years. I was allowing it, for her to read me, partially out of drunken resignation and partially out of an insatiable craving to be acknowledged in one’s entirety.

  
Jordan took pity on me then in a way that would redirect the course of my life. She made an indirect offer. “Archie’s friends are opening a show on Broadway this winter. We’re boarding a ship for New York at the end of the week.” She stopped to ensure she would catch my attention. “There are still so many bright, poetic types in the city. One who might like a companion come Christmas.”

  
Crimson crept into my cheeks and ears. There was nothing left for me in New York, I was certain. I pushed my still steaming coffee to the side and clasped the remnants of the martini.

  
“I wish you and Archie all the best stateside. Maybe I’ll send you a card from a Roman church by the Epiphany.”

  
The fuse of Jordan’s patience had already started to burn away. Another snide comment or redirection from me might have finally sent her away from my side. And yet she stayed and insisted, “Dammit Nick, come with us! You’re a hollow thing, filling yourself with whatever you can hold with two hands.”

  
Had I be in proper possession of my wits, I could have snapped just then. Instead, my reply crawled out of me weakly. “How are you any different?”

  
Jordan looked away from me—not out of any apparent anger or sense of insult—but perhaps to find an unwatched moment of solace in which she could garner up the courage to convince herself. “I know my limits. I may crash into all sorts of things, but I know how to keep myself intact.” She paused and turned back to me with more care in her gaze than I had ever believed she contained in her whole body. “Do you, Nick? Do you keep yourself intact?”

  
My head dropped in my hands, my palms blinders to the rush of uninterrupted partying around us. I wished to wash myself of this night in calm, cool water. But then I thought of the bay, and the glowing heat came back to me for a tormenting fraction of a second. I sat back up to face her and the shameful truth of it all.

  
“I don’t know if I can return to New York.” I swirled the last vortex of gin and its shipwrecked olive at the base of the glass. “The city’s full of ghosts.”

  
She pursed her lips and waited for me to recant or twist my statement into something much more drone and interesting, I suppose. I didn’t, and so she rolled her eyes and chided: “Dear, everywhere’s full of ghosts. Absolutely full of ghosts. And you’re a ghost to someone.”

  
The stream of gray smoke form her painted lips only seemed to emphasize the fact, coloring the atmosphere in some manner that could illuminate Parisian phantoms to me even in my melancholy. Through the smoke, a picturesque form solidified above us. He was an exceedingly beautiful man, second to only one other. The vision in purple, plucked from the silver screen, held a hand out to me.

  
“Love, how kind of you to find a friend for me.” His tenor voice acted as a quick infusion of gasoline to my waning engine.

“Pleasure to meet you! Alexander Archibald, at your service.”

  
Jordan rose and pressed a peck to her husband’s temple. “Archie will bring you home, Nick. I’ll just be a few.” And with that, the swirl of her chiton was lost to the early morning frenzy of the institution.

  
“Where are you going? Where is she going?”

  
“Not to worry, love. She’ll bring her a friend for herself.” He had yet not removed his hand from my own. He gazed down at me with an intensity that made me self-consciously check that I was in fact still wearing clothes. The band started a new song, and over the swell of instruments behind him, he asked, “What may I call you, love?”

  
I stood to face him, half daring myself to press my lips to his right that instant. I refrained. “Nick. Nick Carraway.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! This is my first ever work of fanfiction. I love literature and history, but I know I can't totally recapture the characterizations of the original work or of the 1920s--but I slip in old-timey lingo when I can! I have always loved this book, but always wanted to explore Nick Carraway as a queer character. This is a work in progress and I hope to post many more chapters. Thanks for reading!


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